Rita Manzini

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Maria Rita Manzini is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Florence. She is known for her work on syntax, syntactic variation, principles and parameters, the Romance languages, and the languages of the Balkans. [1] [2] [3]

Contents

Biography

Manzini studied at the University of Pisa and the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, writing her thesis (1979) on control and the generative syntax of Italian. In 1983 she completed a PhD at MIT, advised by Noam Chomsky, with a dissertation titled, Restructuring and Reanalysis. [4] [5]

After a brief period as postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Irvine, she took up a position as Lecturer at University College London, first in the department of Italian (1984–90) then in the department of linguistics and phonetics. In 1992 she was appointed to an associate professorship at the University of Florence, and in 2000 she was promoted to full professor there. [1] [4]

Manzini has held visiting positions at UCLA, SOAS, the University of Oxford, the University of Girona, the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Georgetown University, Université Côte d'Azur, and the University of Brasília. [4]

Honors

In 2018 she was elected as a member of the Academia Europaea. [1]

A Festschrift in her honor, entitled Linguistic Variation: Structure and Interpretation, was published by Mouton in 2020. [6]

Research

Manzini’s research falls under the umbrella of generative syntax. [7] Her early work focused particularly on the theory of non-finite complementation and control. In the 1980s she published a number of works on parameter setting, and in 1992 an influential monograph on locality. [8] With her Florence colleague Leonardo Maria Savoia she is also responsible for I dialetti italiani e romanci (Italian and Romance dialects, 2005), a multi-volume descriptive grammar of Italian dialects couched in the generative framework. The empirical basis for her theoretical work has mostly been Romance languages, but Albanian has also played a major role. [9]

Selected publications

Related Research Articles

In linguistics, syntax is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency), agreement, the nature of crosslinguistic variation, and the relationship between form and meaning (semantics). There are numerous approaches to syntax that differ in their central assumptions and goals.

In linguistics, X-bar theory is a model of phrase-structure grammar and a theory of syntactic category formation that was first proposed by Noam Chomsky in 1970 reformulating the ideas of Zellig Harris (1951), and further developed by Ray Jackendoff, along the lines of the theory of generative grammar put forth in the 1950s by Chomsky. It attempts to capture the structure of phrasal categories with a single uniform structure called the X-bar schema, basing itself on the assumption that any phrase in natural language is an XP that is headed by a given syntactic category X. It played a significant role in resolving issues that phrase structure rules had, representative of which is the proliferation of grammatical rules, which is against the thesis of generative grammar.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Generative grammar</span> Theory in linguistics

Generative grammar, or generativism, is a linguistic theory that regards linguistics as the study of a hypothesised innate grammatical structure. It is a biological or biologistic modification of earlier structuralist theories of linguistics, deriving from logical syntax and glossematics. Generative grammar considers grammar as a system of rules that generates exactly those combinations of words that form grammatical sentences in a given language. It is a system of explicit rules that may apply repeatedly to generate an indefinite number of sentences which can be as long as one wants them to be. The difference from structural and functional models is that the object is base-generated within the verb phrase in generative grammar. This purportedly cognitive structure is thought of as being a part of a universal grammar, a syntactic structure which is caused by a genetic mutation in humans.

Principles and parameters is a framework within generative linguistics in which the syntax of a natural language is described in accordance with general principles and specific parameters that for particular languages are either turned on or off. For example, the position of heads in phrases is determined by a parameter. Whether a language is head-initial or head-final is regarded as a parameter which is either on or off for particular languages. Principles and parameters was largely formulated by the linguists Noam Chomsky and Howard Lasnik. Many linguists have worked within this framework, and for a period of time it was considered the dominant form of mainstream generative linguistics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John R. Ross</span> American poet and linguist

John Robert "Haj" Ross is an American poet and linguist. He played a part in the development of generative semantics along with George Lakoff, James D. McCawley, and Paul Postal. He was a professor of linguistics at MIT from 1966 to 1985 and has worked in Brazil, Singapore and British Columbia, and until spring 2021, he taught at the University of North Texas.

Generative semantics was a research program in theoretical linguistics which held that syntactic structures are computed on the basis of meanings rather than the other way around. Generative semantics developed out of transformational generative grammar in the mid-1960s, but stood in opposition to it. The period in which the two research programs coexisted was marked by intense and often personal clashes now known as the linguistics wars. Its proponents included Haj Ross, Paul Postal, James McCawley, and George Lakoff, who dubbed themselves "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Barbara H. Partee</span> American linguist

Barbara Hall Partee is a Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass). She is known as a pioneer in the field of formal semantics.

Frederick J. (Fritz) Newmeyer is an American linguist who is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Washington and adjunct professor in the University of British Columbia Department of Linguistics and the Simon Fraser University Department of Linguistics. He has published widely in theoretical and English syntax and is best known for his work on the history of generative syntax and for his arguments that linguistic formalism and linguistic functionalism are not incompatible, but rather complementary. In the early 1990s he was one of the linguists who helped to renew interest in the evolutionary origin of language. More recently, Newmeyer argued that facts about linguistic typology are better explained by parsing constraints than by the principles and parameters model of grammar. Nevertheless, he has continued to defend the basic principles of generative grammar, arguing that Ferdinand de Saussure's langue/parole distinction as well Noam Chomsky's distinction between linguistic competence and linguistic performance are essentially correct.

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Rochelle Lieber is an American Professor of Linguistics at the University of New Hampshire. She is a linguist known for her work in morphology, the syntax-morphology interface, and morphology and lexical semantics.

Nina Hyams is a distinguished research professor emeritus in linguistics at the University of California in Los Angeles.

Hagit Borer is a professor of linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. Her research falls within the area of Generative Grammar.

Sige-Yuki Kuroda, also known as S.-Y. Kuroda, was Professor Emeritus and Research Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, San Diego. Although a pioneer in the application of Chomskyan generative syntax to the Japanese language, he is known for the broad range of his work across the language sciences. For instance, in formal language theory, the Kuroda normal form for context-sensitive grammars bears his name.

Eloise Jelinek was an American linguist specializing in the study of syntax. Her 1981 doctoral dissertation at the University of Arizona was titled "On Defining Categories: AUX and PREDICATE in Colloquial Egyptian Arabic". She was a member of the faculty of the University of Arizona from 1981 to 1992.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andrew Radford (linguist)</span> British linguist (born 1945)

Andrew Radford is a British linguist known for his work in syntax and child language acquisition. His first important contribution to the field was a 1977 book on Italian syntax. He achieved international recognition in 1981 for his book Transformational Syntax, which sold over 30,000 copies and was the standard introduction to Chomsky's Government and Binding Theory for many years; and this was followed by an introduction to transformational grammar in 1988, which sold over 70,000. He has since published several books on syntax within the framework of generative grammar and the Minimalist Program of Noam Chomsky, a number of which have appeared in the series Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics.

Raffaella Zanuttini is an Italian linguist whose research focuses primarily on syntax and linguistic variation. She is a Professor of Linguistics at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

Liliane Madeleine Victor Haegeman ARB is a Belgian professor of linguistics at Ghent University. She received her PhD in English linguistics in 1981 from Ghent University, and has written numerous books and journal articles thereafter. Haegeman is best known for her contributions to the English generative grammar, with her book Introduction to Government and Binding Theory (1991) well established as the most authoritative introduction on the Principles and Parameters approach of generative linguistics. She is also acknowledged for her contributions to syntactic cartography, including works on the left periphery of Germanic languages, negation and discourse particles, and adverbial clauses. As a native speaker of West Flemish, her research has also touched upon the comparative study of English and West Flemish in terms of the subject position and its relation to the clausal structure.

Maria Luisa Zubizarreta is professor emerita of linguistics at the University of Southern California.

Henk van Riemsdijk is a Dutch linguist and professor emeritus at Tilburg University.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Academy of Europe: Maria Rita Manzini" . Retrieved 31 August 2022.
  2. "Università degli Studi di Firenze: Maria Rita MANZINI" . Retrieved 31 August 2022.
  3. "maria rita manzini". scholar.google.it. Retrieved 2022-10-06.
  4. 1 2 3 "Academy of Europe: Maria Rita Manzini - Curriculum Vitae" . Retrieved 31 August 2022.
  5. "Alumni and their Dissertations – MIT Linguistics". linguistics.mit.edu. Retrieved 2022-10-06.
  6. Franco, Ludovico; Lorusso, Paolo, eds. (2019-11-18). Linguistic Variation: Structure and Interpretation. De Gruyter. doi:10.1515/9781501505201. ISBN   978-1-5015-0520-1. S2CID   264660647.
  7. Erlewine, Michael Yoshitaka (29 May 2011). "Maria Rita Manzini | 50 years of Linguistics at MIT" . Retrieved 2022-10-06.
  8. "maria rita manzini". scholar.google.it. Retrieved 2022-10-06.
  9. "Università degli Studi di Firenze: Maria Rita MANZINI: Pubblicazioni" . Retrieved 31 August 2022.